HomeReport Card #3: A Panty Political Bootcast on Behalf of the Pantisocratic Party

Report Card #3: A Panty Political Bootcast on Behalf of the Pantisocratic Party

Almost as soon as we called a halt on the latest phase of New Boots activities, just shy of Trumpo’s 100 days – lo the Great Gibberer finally managed to cut off medical support to millions of poorer US citizens by getting his miscackulation of a Health Care Act through the House of Representatives.

And almost as soon as the consequences of that hit home, the results from the UK-wide council elections were upon us, and it would seem the many strong and stable volte faces of Theresa May have been rewarded with the loyalty of thousands of loyal UKIP loyalists.

What, almost nobody demanded, were the poets writing about this? What specifically, literally no-one added, were New Boots and Pantisocracies’s plans? Wearied by if not inured to the Ongoing Ungoodness of Events, dear boy, the utility of a daily articulation of poetic protest might seem minor and muted, someone shouting something that’s probably predictable from within their lefty dome of used if many-coloured principles.

There is undeniably a law of diminishing returns to the poem as merely oppositional statement, though we’d argue that over the three hundred posts we’ve put up since the 2015 General Election, very few were merely oppositional – au contraire, quite a few were bloody-mindedly oppositional to the nth degree.

But what we’ve been after, and have been very grateful on the whole to receive, are poems which enact an imaginative resistance to a failure of the imagination, a retrenchment around a few deeply unhappy motives of greed and fear, a worldview in which it’s more important that what’s mine isn’t yours than to examine what what’s mine is in the first place.

The nature of that resistance is what we’re currently reading back through and assessing – we’d like to think there might be a further publishable volume articulating how the poets of these islands responded to turbulent times – a survey of many ways of looking rather than the expression of one particular constituency or coterie. The viability of Volume 2, however, is also rather dependent on how well Volume 1 does.

We’ve already done and will continue to do readings from the book in an effort to spread the message and, yes, drive up sales. So far we’ve read to perfectly-formed crowdlets in Middlesbrough, ideological home of Smokestack Books, and at this year’s StAnza. Next events are:

August 15th at 12:30pm at the Bosco Theatre (George Street)
(Programme goes live, ironically, on June 8th)

We hope to see you there, and will announce arrangements for readers nearer the time. If you can help set up a similar event near you, please get in touch.

For the moment, might we suggest that if you’ve read this far, and don’t yet possess your very own copy of New Boots and Pantisocracies, then why not bloody well buy one, mate? Or at least suggest to a friend you know would love it that they do so? One two or many can still be got here.

Simultaneously with these noble and worthy endeavours, though, both editors are schemin and plannin what to do when we relaunch on June 8th.

Our manifesto pledges are: we’re going to reduce the numbers of posts to one a week, and that will be, as when we started, a commissioned post. For this we’re going to approach writers who have not yet written anything for the project. This will appear on a Monday.

We will also, however, invite open submissions on a rolling basis – including from more regular contributors – suggesting themes as they occur. Depending on what we receive, then, we may publish a second supplementary poem on a Wednesday.

We’ve also been proud to reproduce images from Sophie Herxheimer (who single-nibbedly invented the category of Protest Calligraphy), and of course, Tim Turnbull, who produced our haunting and loverly cover. We will therefore also be commissioning further graphic work which will appear, when we gots some, on a Friday.

And that, Fellow Pantisocrats, will be that. Do please speak your brains on this and much else in the comments below, as well as on our Facebook and Twitter pages:

If you’re a member of one or another of these social platforms, and you don’t already follow us, please consider doing so, and, if you would, recommend us to friends and interested parties.

New Boots – the Anthology!

A selection of 100 poems from the project is now available in book form from Smokestack (price £8.99) - go here to order.

"Why the devil I throw my money away for that which the blockheads wish?" (G.F. Handel)

Welcome poets, polemicists and the disbelieving masses

The 2015 General Election made manifest the great sea-change that had been occurring in UK politics over the last fifteen to twenty years. Previous certainties, like Labour’s Scottish hegemony, are no more. Older patterns, like Conservative dominance of England, reasserted themselves.

The idea of the UK as a single country has been replaced by a plurality of identities, some long known to the other countries and regions, others formulating themselves as time passes. For that reason, we thought it might be an interesting experiment to chart the responses of those unacknowledged legislators, the poets, over the first 100 days of the new dispensation.

We ended up publishing a poem a day for 138 days, each one responding to some aspect of the new unrealpolitik. We then set to editing a book of 100 poems in order to, as we thought then, conclude the project.

However, the results of the EU Referendum showed that the slow slew in British political identity toward disillusionment and division had reached a breaking point that made even more evident the contrasts already indicated by the Scottish referendum and the General Election. We felt we had to begin again...

Stay with us, and see what the hell happens next. Oh fuck, it's Trump.

Commissioning and Contributions

This site is maintained by self-appointed voluntary arts drones working on zero hours non-contracts. Therefore we simply can't process unsolicited work, and will have to proceed initially at least by invitations. We hope we've got enough sense to ask *you* for a contribution, but please don't be offended if we're so stupid, tired or disempowered that we haven't approached you yet.